Corporate Communications

It’s the businesses that can assess their culture’s health that have a tendency to produce the best work. It’s the teams, lead by values driven leaders where ego has no part to play, that are the happiest and most productive. Collaborative management, consumer focused products and services, marketing communications which target dialogue and engagement as central to achieving objectives, satisfied and inspired employees – today these form the blue print for business success. Interesting that whichever way you look at it, it all starts internally.

“My definition of a dickhead is a person whose ambition for themselves or their own career is greater than their ambition for the project or team.” Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson, No Dickheads! A Guide to Building Happy, Healthy and Creative Teams.

Creative businesses, perhaps unsurprisingly, are great at sharing their thoughts and guidelines on the subject. The common idea celebrates the empathic, accountable and thinking individual which itself acknowledges how we thrive personally and professionally, and the connection between the two.

In their sharing of how they’ve made their workplaces happy, healthy and creative, Rhys Newman, (ex Director of Advanced Design, Nokia and VP/Head of Design, HERE – a Nokia Company) and design researcher and internal communications specialist Luke Johnson (ex Internal Communications Strategist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Principal Design Researcher, HERE) – talk through every facet of a studio laying bare the power of simple gestures – “good morning”, “goodbye” – the importance of food to bring people together, the lives we lead outside of work with family, hobbies and pets, the wonder of language and story telling .

Brooklyn based digital agency Big Spaceship is equally as culturally aware. They’ve shared their philosophy on Slideshare – readOur Manual. Big Spaceship also makes for a great case study in a recent interview by Lindsay Rothfeld on Mashable which looks at people, physical space and human interactions.

Let’s hope this thinking becomes the mainstream with “No Dickheads!” 2015’s professional development mantra.

I came across this in my inbox today. A subscriber value-add from Fairfax. Quite nice. Raw and passionate. Believable. Senior journos explaining the meaning behind their craft, what drives them and its importance to contributing to social good. Journalism must be independent. It’s Fairfax’s mantra – ‘Independent. Always.’

Few professions can offer the same amount of integrity and purpose. But if you’re a communications person, as I am, and work in public relations dealing with the media, listen to their words closely.

Unless you are approaching your media relations with the same energy and intent to impart knowledge and information that is useful, relevant or interesting – I’d have to agree, you’re treading dangerous waters if you want to catch a serious journalist’s attention.

“For every one journalist there’s probably about a dozen PR people who are trying to hide the truth, says Adele Ferguson.

Consumers are brand curators in this integrated, experiential, social screen age. What are the questions brand owners need to be asking, and to whom?

The sheer number and complexity of meanings assigned to the word ‘brand’ is a modern marketing dilemma. Add to this consumer expectation of the role we expect brands to play in our lives, and how we want them to behave, and you’ll hear dissension in the ranks.

Most communications problems tend to be complex.The following probing questions may help you to generate even greater ideas for your next communications task. Perhaps you’ve devised a system already, but you can never ask too many questions, right? Click on the following link to view – Communications questions